Tom Sleigh most recent volume of poetry is Space Walk. He teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College. His essay “The Deeds,” from the Summer 2008 issue of VQR, was selected for Best American Travel Writing 2009.
The Dadaab Refugee Camp and the Eastleigh neighborhood of Nairobi have seen an influx of hundreds of thousands of Somalis seeking a better life—but, as often as not, Kenya can offer them little.
1 / On the Train
Outback of the mind. Shiver of the fens
in oily desolation staining the swamp water
frozen over. Newark up ahead, the telephoto lens
of the heart homing in on a dead son or daughter.
If you wait long enough, the oil [...]
Her eyes alertly track my eyes staring
at her face so disfigured that I have to will
my eyes to keep on looking as she sits there
playing with her doll, telling it to mind her
mind her now, and then smiling at it
with what’s left of her lips [...]
The mass burial site for the victims of an Israeli air strike on Qana on July 30, 2006. (Feyrouz / CC)
1
“When we drove into Qana last year,” Joseph told me, scanning the gray concrete houses on either side of the road, [...]
No one speaking, nothing moving
except for the way the snow keeps falling,
its falling a kind of talking in the dark
while all across the valley we keep on sleeping
in the separate conditions of our dreaming.
His face all overgrown wit [...]
“We, the most faraway people
on the earth,
the last of the free
shielded until today
by our remoteness
and obscurity,
even here we know
what everybody knows:
that those who know
little about us
are by their very ignorance
convinced w [...]
Although my sympathies may lie with the horse and not with God’s implacable heat, implicit in this conversion story are questions about identity, how it gets established, and what forces are sufficient to sponsor it. In the realm of poetry cocktail parties, you get to hear your share of conversion stories: cocktail parties being what they are, no one is under oath. And so I once witnessed a poet undergo multiple conversions in a single evening: depending on the confessor’s faith, this Paul/Saul claimed to be an autobiographical poet one moment, a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet the next, a narrative poet after that. Totally apart from whether or not these professions were sincere, is the question as to why a poet shouldn’t be able to inhabit all these positions at the same time. And it’s an interesting question as to why this kind of fluidity causes such unease in the poetry world, as well as in the realm of cultural debate. If you claim to be in league with the aesthetics of poet X, then you can’t possibly like the work of poet Y.
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